"Rudy Rucker - Freeware" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

be carried out by well-paid moldies, but it took Tre's unique sensibility to come up with
juicy, tasty, gnarly images that people felt a visceral need to see over and over. Tre got
royalties on the effects that Apex was able to use.

With Monique in their employ, Tre and Terri's motel responsibilities amounted to little
more than providing a human interface for the guests to interact with. They needed to be
there to buffer new arrivals from the unsettling sight and smell of Monique.
The guests, always tourists, usually middle-class and Midwestern, came to Santa Cruz
because of its low prices and were often shocked at the number of moldies. There weren't
very many moldies in the heartlands, for the people there hated themтАФmany
Midwesterners were Heritagists. The common Heritagist term for burning a moldie in a
puddle of grain alcohol was "fryin' up an Iowa chop." "With truffle sauce." people would
add sometimes, referring to the deep-buried nuggets of camote fungus that would crisp
up as a moldie's twitching plastic disintegrated into the flames, sending off psychedelic
clouds of blackened spores.

It was up to Terri and Tre to put the guests at ease in the free zone of Santa Cruz and to
make them feel that Santa Cruz wasn't threatening, even though the town was filled with
students, moldies, farmworkers, surfers, and homeless stoners. But, yes, prices were low,
and there were a lot of entertaining things to do.

Monique's husband Xlotl worked at Los Trancos Taco Bar, just down the hill from the
Clearlight. As well as chopping the vegetables and cleaning the kitchen, Xlotl maintained
the tank in which the meats used for the tacos were grown. The tank contained four
perpetually self-renewing loaves of meat: chicken, beef, pork, and wendyтАФwendy being
the human-cloned flesh which had taken such a hold on people's palates in recent months.
Pulling clean sheets off her cart for Room 3B on this sunny October morn, Monique
resembled a short Indian-blooded Mexican woman. Her skin was a coppery orange, with
irregular veins of green and blue lichen just below the surface. Rather than forking into
legs, her lower body was a solid tapering mass that fluted out into a broad bottom
diskтАФMonique was shaped more or less like a chessman with arms, like a pawn or a
queen or a knight. The exact appearance of her humanoid head and arms was something
she could tweak according to the realtime situation. But when Monique relaxed, like now,
she looked Aztec.
Monique's disk-shaped plastic foot had ridges on the bottom, piezoplastic imipolex ridges
that could ripplingly glide Monique across level surfaces. For more rapid progress or on
an irregular terrain, Monique could hop. If the utmost speed was called for, she could flip
her body out of the "chess man" mode and go over into another of her body's stable
attractor modes, a mode in which she could fly. In this alternate "pelican" mode, Monique
became a set of great flapping wings attached to a tapered big-eyed body resembling the
brown pelicans who dive for fish along the Santa Cruz coast.
Monique's tissues had at least three other basic attractor modes as well: the spread-out
"puddle" shape she used for soaking up sun, the seagoing "shark" shape, and the rarely
used "rocket" shape that moldies could use to fly back and forth between the Earth and
the Moon, not that a moldie like Monique had any desire to go to the Moon with its fanatic
loonie moldies.

The changes between body modes could happen quite abruptly, like a structure of springs
and dowels that snaps into a new position if you pull one of its armatures just soтАФlike the
Zeeman Catastrophe Machine of the 1970s, which was an educational toy made out of